Last Cryptogram of 2009

Really like this quote, because I’ve often thought that students who spend hours in school studying something they truly are not interested may actually be harming their brain. Of course, some might say it builds mental toughness and discipline…Play the cryptogram, and I’d be curious to hear what some of you think.

It’s totally true. However, it doesn’t mean teachers and school programs are to be banished from our society. It is our duty (by our I’m including myself in the teachers, because I’m studying to become so and I’m including the society as a group) to find important matters for our children and teenagers so they can invest themselves in valuable learnings. It is also our role, as teachers, to take the content that are the foundations of knowledge and bring it in a way so that kids are interested in it. (By “basic contents” I mean language and grammar, because it’s the only way to share knowledge, maths, to have some basis of rational thinking, literature, because it makes readers grow and evolve, etc.)

For your interpretation, RK, it is very humanist, or more precisely Rogerian (from Carl Rogers). You may be interested by his essay “Freedom to learn?” in which he talks about these matters, i.e. the fact that a rigid teaching (Let’s say a teaching that does not consider self-learning, exploration, learnings that implies a full commitment from the subject, that is self-induced projects) is meaningless, if not harmful, for the learner. The role of the teacher would be one of a guide of a provider of knowledge who steps up only if the students need to.

Anyways, I won’t write a 200 pages essay on this but it’s particularly appealing to me. I think that, without excluding school, grades or exams as Rogers propose, we can change way school is brought to children as a valuable experience, stuffed with engaging projects.

Da Vinci was certainly the role model for love-of-work. He seems to have attacked with passion everything that he encountered.

It’s an interesting platitude, but I don’t agree that study without desire leads to ZERO retention. Most of us have been in the situation where we had to learn something that held little interest, both in school or work, and yet we have managed to learn and retain. I will concede that the retention in these instances is likely to be oriented toward “Tell me what I need to know” rather than “I want to know everything there is to know.”

I could better support the statement “Learning without desire leads to comparatively less retention.” Less eloquent, but likely closer to the truth.

“School…. may actually be harming the brain.”
I’m going to use that next time I’m out with the kids during school hours and we get “What, no school today?”
“Oh, they don’t go to school – It rots the brain you know.”

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